


The Meaning of the Word

by JustAPassingGlance



Category: Glee
Genre: Alternate Universe, Kid Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-27
Updated: 2014-07-27
Packaged: 2018-03-09 12:43:22
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3250127
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JustAPassingGlance/pseuds/JustAPassingGlance
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Eight year old Sebastian has a very specific grasp on some of the words in the English language.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Meaning of the Word

“Coop.” Absently, Blaine tugged at the hem of his older brother’s t-shirt. They were standing outside the entrance to the mall’s movie theater, waiting for their mom to pick them up. “Coop, what does that sign say?” He pointed to the sign on the doors behind them, blue letters on a transparent background, the blocky font hard to read from the distance he was standing at.

Cooper sighed. “It says ‘No solicitation allowed on the premise,” he read disinterestedly.

Blaine tilted his head in contemplation. “But what does that mean?”

“It means don’t bother your brother with questions when he was nice enough to take time out of his Saturday to bring you and your friend to see a stupid movie.”

“It wasn’t stupid. It was AWESOME. You were laughing.”

Cooper scoffed. “I was laughing at how incredibly dumb it was.”

“And,” Blaine pressed, “I don’t think that’s  _really_ was the sign means.”

With another sigh and an exaggerated eye roll, Cooper pulled out his walkman and snapped his headphones over his ears.

“I know what it means,” Sebastian whispered.

Blaine turned eagerly towards his best friend. “How?”

“I read it in a book.”

Blaine nodded in understanding. Sebastian read more than almost anyone Blaine knew. And he read weird books. Big, musty old things with speckled pages and bindings that threatened to fall apart if you turned the page too fast. Not even Blaine was allowed to touch them. ‘Maybe when you’re older,’ Sebastian would say haughtily, in a manner that was obnoxiously reminiscent of Cooper.

It was fine though. Maybe Sebastian could use his real, live, genuine microphone when he was older too.

“So?” Blaine asked.

Furtively, Sebastian looked around. A few feet from them stood a group of teenagers, huddled together and sharing a funny smelling cigarette. The door behind them opened and a family of five tumbled out, the three kids bounding ahead while their frazzled parents trailed behind looking overwhelmed and under-rested from beneath the pile of bags they carried. “Not here,” he whispered, head jerking towards the green mini-van that was pulling up in front of them. 

“Tree house?”

Sebastian shook his head. “Basement fort.” He plastered his biggest smile on his face and said, in a tone of pure innocent, “Hello, Mrs. Anderson,” as the van rolled to a stop in front of them.

“Hi, Mom. How was your day?” Blaine asked politely as they slid into the backseat of the van. “Did you get everything you needed at the supermarket?”

“I did.” Mrs. Anderson waited until everyone was buckled in before flicking her turn signal on and inching away from the sidewalk. “And pork chops were on sale this week.”

“We had pork chops twice last week,” Cooper groaned.

“If you don’t like what I’m making for dinner, you can buy and make yours yourself,” Mrs. Anderson snapped.

Cooper slumped further down in his seat but didn’t say anything, for once letting the music on the radio fill the car instead of his voice.

“Would it be okay if I went over to Sebastian’s, just for a little bit?” Blaine asked as they turned into their neighborhood.

“If you boys spent any more time together…” Mrs. Anderson chuckled and shook her head. “As long as it’s okay with his parents,” she said as more of a formality than anything. The two of them spent all their time running back and forth between each other’s houses.

“Mom said I could invite Blaine over for dinner. She’s cooking tonight.” Sebastian affirmed, his nose wrinkling up. “But I’m sure he would rather eat whatever you’re making.”

“You’re always more than welcome at our house for dinner, Sebastian. You know that.” She had heard enough stories about Mrs. Smythe’s failed cooking attempts to be sympathetic to what it meant that she was making dinner again.

“Dad and I will just end up going out for pizza while she’s on her evening jog,” Sebastian shrugged. “But thank you.”

The moment they got to Sebastian’s house, they were rushing through the kitchen, down the hall, and into the basement.

“Blaine’s here,” Sebastian called over his shoulder, voice echoing through the house. “We’ll be downstairs.”

A shouted ‘okay’ floated after them from Mr. Smythe’s study.

Generally, they spent most of their time during the warmer months in Blaine’s tree house and it wasn’t until the first real snowfall that they relocated below ground. Early on in their friendship, they had determined that the Anderson’s always had the best popsicles and, while Mrs. Smythe generally struggled with anything involving the stove, she made the most delicious hot chocolate in the entire state.

 During the summer, only the most important and secretive things were talked about in the basement fort, the things that not even the birds and the squirrels were allowed to hear.

Blaine held back the thick blanket that doubled as a door and waited for Sebastian to crawl in before he dropped to his knees and followed.

The fort was built into a little alcove in the basement. Every year it became more and more cramped. Once there had been an assortment of play furniture in there, but as Sebastian’s limbs shot outward and Blaine slowly inched upward, they emptied it out and now there was only a pile of blankets in one corner, a lantern in the middle, and two beanbag chairs for them to sit in.

Blaine couldn’t wait for Sebastian to get settled. The secrets of the sign had been preying on his mind ever since they left it, especially since neither Cooper nor Sebastian would tell him what it had meant. There was nothing he hated more than being left out. “Tell me,” he demanded.

Sebastian took his time fluffing up his chair in order to build up the moment. Finally he sat down and crossed his long legs out in front of him. “It means,” he said imperiously, “that you can’t buy sex there.”

Blaine blinked. “What?”

“Sex. Like kissing and making babies and…” he trailed off and waived his hand around to encapsulate everything that he assumed sex was. “All those other things adults do with their clothes off. Or partially off,” he added, shuddering a little at the memory of walking in on his parents in the laundry room when they thought he was over at Blaine’s.

Blaine chewed his lip as he mulled this information over. “So that’s what so-lic’ta-tion means?” He weighed each syllable of the word carefully on his tongue before he let it out.

Sebastian nodded. “Soliciting is what prostitutes do.”

“Prostitutes?”

“Women who stand on street corners in really, really low cut shirts. Like shirts to here,” he pointed to the middle of his stomach, “and they wear a lot of lipstick and if you drive by them really slowly it means you’re interested in buying sex from them.”

“Then why was the sign at the mall? That’s not a street corner.”

“Maybe they do it in the mall too. It has to get real boring just standing on a street corner. In the mall they can sit, or eat at the food court, or whatever.”

Blaine’s eyes widened in realization, “Is that what those empty hallways are for? The one right by the food court that doesn’t go anywhere and doesn’t have any stores? And the one over by Dick’s?”

“Definitely. What else would they be for? And that’s why we aren’t allowed to go down them. Our parents don’t want us knowing.”

"Another conspiracy," whispered Blaine. They were very big on conspiracies; they kept track of them in a plain blue notebook carefully labelled ‘History’ in Sebastian’s messy scrawl and stashed under Blaine’s bed along with his collection of egg shells and feathers that his mom had deemed ‘unhygienic’. "I’ll add it to the book when I get home."

"And," Sebastian said, drumming his fingers against his leg as he thought, "we should see how far this goes. Have you noticed signs like that anywhere else?"

"No. I don’t think so." Blaine said slowly. "But I don’t remember seeing the one on at the movies before.”

Without saying anything, Sebastian was up and out of his seat and darting from the fort. Blaine stayed where he was, listening to the sound of his friend’s feet thundering up the stairs and running overhead. Faintly, he heard Mr. Smythe’s voice yelling ‘We walk in the house, Sebastian,” in the same exasperated tone he always used when they disrupted his work.

Clearly Sebastian decided to disregard the fatherly advice, if the thundering back overhead was anything to go by.

"I still can’t believe you just ignore your dad like that," Blaine shook his head as Sebastian came wriggling back through the blanket-door, dragging poster board and a bucket of markers with him.

"You know he doesn’t care what I do as long as we stay out of his office and don’t break anything mom cares about. Not like your parents." Sebastian’s parents had rules about everything but a combination of never being home (his mom) and a lack of desire (his dad) meant enforcement was practically nonexistent. The Andersons, by comparison, had very few rules but fiercely enforced the ones they had. Running in the house meant no dessert for two days, a week if Blaine had to be told twice.  

"What’s that for?" He nodded at the supplies Sebastian had brought in and wondered if he could get away with using glitter markers this time, they added a nice splash of pizazz to any project. Even Sebastian had been impressed with his science fair poster.

"Maps. We’re going to map the town. You draw from Main Street up to Chestnut and I’ll do down to the highway. And then when we’re out, we look for more signs and mark them down here." With a red cherry-scented marker he drew in the school on the corner of Perrin Street and Central Avenue. "We keep this down here and mark off as we find them." He leaned over to place an X where Blaine would be drawing the movie theater.

Picking up a black marker, Blaine carefully began to outline the streets of the town, biting his tongue to keep himself from complaining about the fact that drawing straight lines would be easier with the help of a ruler. They worked studiously for twenty minutes, occasionally conferring as to whether the bakery was on the left or the right side of that store that sold fancy old things and if the cigar shop was still open. Blaine was just adding leaves to the big maple tree in front of the veterinarian’s office on Woodbury when his stomach gave a loud grumble.

"Snack break?" Sebastian threw aside his marker and scampered to his feet. "We have Rocky Road and Gushers."

"Together?" Blaine wrinkled his nose as he capped his own marker and put it back in the bucket.

"Don’t knock it until you try it." Sebastian tapped his foot impatiently as Blaine tidied up the space. "Last one there has to eat celery," he declared, knowing full well that he had the advantage of long limbs.

"Not fair!" Blaine yelled, forgoing standing in favor of a hurried crawl that mercilessly knocked Sebastian aside as they battled their way out of the fort. He made it to the stairs first, only to be caught around the waist and dragged back down by his best friend.

They squirmed their way up the stairs in a writhing tangle of boyish limbs. Together they burst through the basement door and collapsed in a panting heap on the hallways floor.

"Boys," Mr. Smythe yelled again, "We don’t-"

"Run in the house," they recieted back, amidst a fit of breathless laughter.

"Just keep it down out there." The office door creaked open and he poked his head out into the hallway, sighing heavily as he looked down at the two boys sprawled across his floor.

Physically, the only similarity between Mr. Smythe and his son was their height but they were definitely more alike in personality than either of them ever wanted to admit. “And don’t forget your mother is making dinner. So make sure you ruin your appetite.” He winked at them before disappearing behind the door again.

"Add some Cap’n Crunch?" chirped Blaine, disentangling his legs from Sebastian’s and making his way to the kitchen.

"I was thinking Lucky Charms," he shouted after Blaine from where he was still on the floor. "Or what if we put the ice cream between two waffles?"

"Wouldn’t it melt?"

Sebastian rolled his eyes as he got to his feet “Only if we cooked them first. But if they’re both frozen…”

"You’re disgusting," Blaine called from the kitchen. "And I win."

Sebastian just barely dodged the package of celery that was flung at his chest. “It’s my house,” he reached over Blaine’s head and plucked the ice cream from the freezer. “I can eat whatever I want.” Continuing to hold the ice cream above his head, he danced over to the utensil drawer and grabbed a spoon from it, planting himself firmly in front of the drawer so Blaine couldn’t get to it.

"Bowl!" he reprimanded as Sebastian pried the lid off the ice cream and dug in with his spoon.

"’oo late," Sebastian mumbled around a sticky mouthful. “‘S’lmost em’ty anyway."

Standing on tiptoe, Blaine peered into the container. “It’s half full.”

"Well, it will be almost empty by the time we’re done with it." Grinning wide, he offered the spoon to Blaine.

And really, Blaine couldn’t argue with logic like that. 


End file.
